Can the Most Contentious Piece of the Web Form the Basis of a New Standard? Inside Google’s Plan To Make the Whole Web as Fast as AMP (theverge.com)

Dieter Bohn, writing for The Verge: In a blog post today, Google is announcing that it’s formally embarking on a project to convince the group in charge of web standards to adopt technology inspired by its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework. In theory, it would mean that virtually any webpage could gain the same benefits as AMP: near-instantaneous loading, distribution on multiple platforms, and (critically) more prominent placement on Google properties. This is important, a little tricky to understand, and critical to how the web and Google interact in the future. In many ways, Google’s success or failure in this endeavor will play a major role in shaping how the web works on your phone.

[…] By creating AMP, Google blithely walked right into the center of a thicket comprised of developers concerned about the future of the web. Publishers are worried about ceding too much control of their distribution to gigantic tech companies, and all of the above are worried that Google is not so much a steward of the web but rather its nefarious puppet master. The whole situation is slightly frustrating to David Besbris, VP of search engineering at Google. Earlier this week, I went to Mountain View to talk with Besbris and Malte Ubl, engineering lead for AMP. “This is honestly a fairly altruistic project from our perspective,” says Besbris. “It wasn’t like we invented AMP because we wanted to control everything, like people assume,” he says. Instead, he argues, go back and look at how dire the state of the mobile web was a few years ago, before AMP’s inception.